Montreal Canadiens' P.K. Subban, oozing with talent and confidence, has long been a target for opponents, critics

At the time, through the spring and early fall of 2005, nobody on the team seemed quite sure what to make of P.K. Subban, the teenaged defenceman selected with a middle-round pick by the Belleville Bulls in the draft. They knew he had talent, but came to suspect that false modesty was not among those talents.

Boston Bruins fans hate him. They boo him on sight, even during pre-game warmups. Ottawa Senators fans hate him, as do most of the Ottawa Senators who play against him. Sports Illustrated has named him among the most hated players in hockey. The average hater, at home, phones in and rants about him on sports talk radio shows, or else rages about him in NHL comment threads, and not entirely because he plays for the Montreal Canadiens, although that can be a part of it, and not entirely because he is young and earning US$3.75-million this year, although that can be a part of it, too.

Word had gotten out that, on the day of the draft, Subban, a 15-year-old who slipped down to the sixth round, told Bulls general manager George Burnett he intended to make the team that season. Rookies are generally supposed to be seen, rather than heard.

“When he said he was going to make the team, we’re just like, ‘Who’s this guy, this sixth-round draft pick thinking he’s going to make the team?’” former Bulls defenceman Geoff Killing said. “Once you get to know him as a person, you realize … that’s the reason he’s such a good player, because he is that confident.”

Subban made the team, and was playing against the other team’s best lines by his second season, often paired with Killing. Subban wanted to be on special teams, he wanted to be out on the ice in the last minute of a one-goal game. Killing said recently: “You could tell right from when he walked in the room that he was going to be pretty good.”

Now at age 24, Subban has already won the Norris Trophy as the NHL’s best defenceman, and he won a gold medal with the Canadian men’s hockey team in Sochi three months ago. And heading into Monday night, he was tied for the lead among defencemen in playoff scoring, with nine points — two goals, seven assists — in six games with the Montreal Canadiens.

He has been held without a point in only one of those games. Subban scored twice in the series-opening win over the Boston Bruins last Thursday, and had a pair of assists in a 5-3 loss in Game 2 on Saturday.

“Sometimes a little too flashy for us old-school guys,” Hall of Fame centre Doug Gilmour said during an interview with TSN Radio 1050 in Toronto last week. “You’d keep that in the back of your mind and, sooner or later, take a [few] liberties on him.”

Don Cherry, who famously took the liberty of kissing Gilmour on live national television, has become a regular critic of Subban. In January, Cherry criticized Subban for being too exuberant in celebrating an overtime goal against the Ottawa Senators — “absolutely ridiculous” — and chided him again last week for being too fond of landing molar-rattling bodychecks.

It fell on to a mounting pile of critiques from Coach’s Corner, actually. Cherry has also gone on record calling a celebration Subban and goaltender Carey Price once held after wins, a discreet, specialized handshake known as the triple low-five: “You can’t do that and expect the players to like you.”

All of it, from Gilmour to Cherry and from various voices around the game, feed into the same sort of cloud that circled Subban in his junior career. It was wrong then, too, with a sense of confidence that seems to be mistaken for something else.

“People talk about his cockiness, his arrogance and all that, and I don’t think that’s him,” said Burnett, who is also the Belleville coach. “Is his confident? Absolutely. I think any player that has high expectations of himself is always going to speak in a confident way.”

In 2005, after declaring he would make the Bulls as a rookie, Burnett said Subban spent the summer working, preparing. (Subban told the Belleville Intelligencer that he studied tapes of Bobby Orr: “Just how he controlled the play — he eluded everyone on the ice.”)

By the time training camp arrived, the Bulls realized it would be impossible to send him away. He made the roster and has become an example the Bulls have trotted out for lower-round picks ever since.

“The work’s always been there,” Burnett said. “He’s not a guy that cuts corners in practice, or doesn’t get to the weight room. Those things are done above and beyond. And even when the cameras aren’t around, he’s the type of guy who will make good choices and do the right thing.”

Killing, his old defence partner, helped facilitate some of those choices on the ice. One of the older players on the roster, Killing was a more cautious defenceman, which permitted Subban to roam and take risks: “I’d be back to kind of save his ass.”

Now 26, Killing is general manager at Tork Winch-Posilok, in Woodstock, Ont., working at a company that claims to produce the “best winches in the industry,” and chuckling as he talks about playing alongside a future Norris Trophy winner: “It’s pretty cool to be able to say you were his [defence] partner for a couple of years.”